COLOUR GRADING in FINAL CUT PRO X

what's up everyone welcome back totally exposed and we did a video on the channel previously a beginner's guide to Final Cut Pro 10 and following on from that today we're going to be exploring some more advanced topics yeah in this video we're gonna look at color grading the Final Cut Pro X so awesome ready let's do it let's do this right so let's get into this and how do I do it kind of in what is the kind of color grades what is it kind of grade you shoot footage and your camera will have a color profile associated with it and when you've edited it all up you can stylize the colors however you would like to stylize them you could over accentuate the greens or make the skin tones all go funny in pink or do whatever it is that you want to do now we tend to shoot a lot of the time in what's called vlog format logarithmic profiles in general are designed to allow you to shoot in a much more well it gives you a loads more dynamic range when you're shooting okay as a consequence when you actually look at the footage they're very d saturated and they're very uncommon drastic yeah and then it's kind of up to you then as an editor or colorist to inject your own color scheme on top of that okay so we've just made like a little tiny montage we've dug through some archives of our clips we've got Neil here being a pilot with a camera so we've got some we've got some footage that we can work with so we're just going to go through quickly what we do generally in Final Cut Pro to calibrate our footage the tools that we use how we go about it let's go let's get into it so the first thing we tend to do we want to add an adjustment layer across all of our footage and the reason for that being that any adjustments we make we don't want to make them all too clear yeah and then have to go through the rigmarole of a reapply it to a clip but then halfway through the project you go actually I want to change it and you've got to change it on every click again this is like a yeah it kind of just the whole lot so let's start off by going to the titles pane and we'll go and get our adjustment layer and our dragon adjustment layer over the whole of this clip or our little sequence sorry so now I have an adjustment layer that we can use to do our color grade on now as I said this is all in log formats and you'll see the colors quite washed out there quite d saturated we're on mat books as you well you'll be on a Mac if you're using Final Cut Pro map it's got quite good screens but you can't rely on the screen to interpret color really the screen information could be wrong and calibrated incorrectly you could be using an external monitor so you have to start using scopes that's what scopes are the most important tool that you can use when your color grading because you can't rely on what you're seeing or what your monitor is displaying to make decisions based on color information okay whereas scopes are scientific and you can actually look at the scopes and go right yeah there it that is a bit blue or the white lines is off a bit here or whatever make sense so at the moment we haven't got any scopes in view but if you press command + seven you will bring up your scopes view and you can configure your scopes to be whatever it is that you want by here so you can click the view and you can say I would like to see well I've got it splitted like two different types of scopes and these are the two scopes I tend to use so scope number one is the vector scope and scope number two is the RGB parade okay and we'll come to these more and detail as we go along but in essence the vector scope shows you the information of luminosity of an image and how much it goes in a given direction of its color so you have a color wheel going around the out right here and if the image was entirely blue or really blue you'll see that it's all gonna live out kind of over here on this side of the of the diagram okay make sense the more blue something is the further out it will become the more kind of neutral it is it was a little kind of in the middle and this is particularly helpful I find when it comes to deal with skin tones which we'll come to in a second secondly we have the RGB parade now this is a representation of the image from left to right and it shows how bright or how dark the image is from left to right and this is split by RGB so how much of the red channel there is coming to the green Channel and how much of the blue Channel okay so if your image is too warm your red channel will be quite high and your blue channel will be quite low and if your image is too cool you channel rods would be quite high and your red trying to be quite low you can see here the representation of you in this image so you can see this side of the image is darker where your for your head and the tree is than the right hand side of the image and that's represented here by this left hand side of the image having the channel and the right hand side having a lighter panel and each one of these lamp posts represents a spike of white information on here so this is the luminosity going up and down and then you can see violet pin across is breakdown of whether it's too warm or whether it's too cool the different color channels that make it up and there are a bunch of other scopes but these two I think are pretty good to get you going with so sit yourself up like that if you haven't already and we'll move on so the first thing we want to do is we want to get our log footage into a kind of a more what we want it to be more contrasting to have more color okay and there's kind of things that exist that can help you do that quickly called Lutz or look-up tables yeah everyone's head of Lutz I think if you've started researching any form of color grading you'll have heard of Lutz and there's two types of Lutz there's technical Lutz and there's creative Lutz now creative Lutz they're the sex and lust they're what kind of give you or potentially like the teal and orange Lollywood yeah or loads of like nice saturated greens or that gives you a good kind of basis for creating a really nice creative look right technical nuts got a sexy but required nonetheless they transform from a color space to a standardized color space so we're shooting in C log which is canons version of logs okay and if you were shooting on Sony you'd be an S log so regardless of what profile you shot your footage in you tend to want to get it all into a standardized color space okay which is called rec 709 and most Lux creative luxe that is there normally based off of the fact that you've got your footage into into that color space so that you're working everyone's working off the same sheet when they get going with their creative lips okay so so doesn't matter if you're filming on Canon or Sony rec 709 is sort of a standard across the board that is yeah it's a standardized color space yeah you can buy Lux that take you straight from a log file all the way up but if you haven't even got log on your camera chances are you're shooting in sort of a rec 709 color space anyways this step may not apply to you let's start by transforming this footage into rec 709 using a lot I recommend you install em Lux to load in your lux because I think the tool is very good yeah you get good luck previews and stuff and it has some good tactical that's already built in so you haven't got to looking over on the Canon website of the same website to find the specific black for your camera if you don't want to you can use their defaults and they're pretty good so is that a free plugin em light isn't time free there'll be a link in the in the video description down below for how you can go and get that okay so we've got the M plug-in installed okay so you've got it installed and if you come over here and click on effects you should be able to search for it and see it pop up there it is M not by motion VFX and all I'm going to do now is I'm going to drag this onto my adjustment layer now within this plug-in itself you can see you have a couple of options you can use some of their preset locks which we're gonna have to be doing here in this instance you can also then load in or your custom loads so when you go off and you purchase custom that stuff of your favorite youtubers or whoever it may be you can load them into the software and it will form like a nice gallery view eh I'll get to in a minute which is actually quite quick to just click around and see what works the project that you're actually doing at the moment but for starters if I click on am not presets I'm going to change my drop-down to go to the utility log to rec.709 now that this is built into M lat so this is their collection of camera manufacturers and different ways of getting from log profile as we said to rec 709 and then from rec so annoying that's when you can start going crazy okay now weirdly they have got Canon in here but I think the airing log conversion gives you a better starting point so we're going to have a look at re and use one of theirs plus I like how it actually updates in real time when you're kicking through these absolutely so you can compare different kind of camera manufacturers now technically like I say we should be using Canon and we're using C log one there but I mean I looked too saturated for me I think like the Blues look too saturated on the Cameron's death I think I like the roll off of everything more here on the re profile so as a starting basis I think we'll go with re but this is where your creativity comes into it so use a good utility like to get you to a color space that you think works for the footage that you're shooting and go from there okay so now you can see that we've got this applied and if I click three you can see the transformation that's had already between the two even though we've had this adjustment layer which goes over the whole clip it doesn't mean you can't then do tweaks it Clips underneath it yeah so for example here I think that this looks okay I mean it looks a bit cool but it was a cold day yeah this shot however this does look a bit too cool but you this is supposed to be on the on the 70-200 is supposed to be like a kind of a grayish whitish lens but that's got a real blue hue as has your hair absolutely this shot here that kind of looks accurate I think that the air from yeah looking at that briefly that looks okay and then this will final shot here again I think that's right looks really nice I mean off the bat you could argue that there's not much more to do that looks pretty good yeah that's shot I think is a bit too blue yes I agree so before we do color grading we need to start doing color correction okay and that's normally matching your shots to make sure that when you then have do your color grading I could say that it's uniform right so that one that's cool this one is cool the other one that's called this one looks a bit too blue so this one particular clip we're going to make some changes so that we bring it more in line with everything else and we can use our scripts to do this if we look at this clip here I know that visually we can tell it looks alright but look at the scopes all of the red blue the red green and blue channels like the the shadow lines are all kind of at the same re value whereas as soon as you jump over to this next clip you can tell that that Blues a lot more prevalent and you see the difference so what we're going to do is we're going to make our first adjustment to this we're going to click on the clip and not the adjustment layer and now up here you'll see this little triangle and the little triangle that's your color Corrections and grading sort of tap now here we have color wheels which is what's set up to be my default as soon as you click on that it will add a tool we have color board color wheels color curves in the hue saturation cares okay and you can change in the software what you want your default color grading tool to be as soon as you click on that button in your when you're going to Final Cut Pro and preferences and then here general color correction color wheels okay so color also my preferred kind of go to tool so that's what I've got set up I would say that the white balance needs changing ever so slightly just to kind of warm up a little bit here if you have the temperature underneath the color wheels which is affecting the whole clip and if I drag away to the left it's going to get cooler and cooler and cooler and look at what it's doing to the RGB curves over there and as I drag it to the right getting warmer and warm and you should see that there's more information coming through on the red channels and the green tiles now you look at this a bit ill yeah got like liver failure a tiny amount is probably all it needs here I'd say maybe about that yeah I mean we still got some blue information because as I say it's a cool day but yeah I think I'm happy with that and now we can cross-reference how how does your hair look how does your skin look how does your jacket look between the two shots does it match I think it does yeah you can also start looking at the exposure of your shots so if this shots was massive I'm gonna shut this panel for a second if this shot was massively under or overexposed compared to any of the others like you could argument maybe this doesn't look as bright as this yeah you can have gain you can adjust individual clips so I'm going to use my color wheels here to adjust this particular clip now the color wheels are for those four wheels here as is until you have master which affects the whole clip and then you have shadows highlights and mid-tones so your shadows are obviously your darker parts of the image highlights are the lightest parts of the image like your little your hair they are then mid-tones is kind of everything else in the middle and you can start to see what parts of what by just having a plane so if I crank the shadows right up you'll see that the brightest bits get brighter and again you can see this kind of represented on the two radius you can double click on these at any time to fully reset or you can click the little reset button down here the highlights will make the the lightest bits lighter so let's look at this lens that should get really bright but it shouldn't affect much of the jacket which is correct and then the mid-tones is sort of well everything in between the two really okay whereas the master of will affect all three channels so that would just make the whole lot brighter or no so the right-hand side of these color wheels is the exposure the left-hand side of these color wheels is the saturation so if I wanted to desaturate the whole of the image I would use the master wheel and I could drag this all the way down and I have a black or white image or I could pump it all the way up and you have a horrible oversaturated image let's say I want to just add a bit more saturation to the mid-tones I could pump a bit more saturation in there so it's kind of more like your skin and tends to live in that vibe now you can see this is where the vectorscope comes into play a lot more however the father line goes out in a given direction towards the edge of the wheel that shows the amount of saturation that it has in that directional color like a maintance yet so if I crank the saturation up on the master in every direction you'll see that everything goes out and it's quite a lot of blue in the image so the blue the blue a sort of cyan the area of that of the vectorscope gets quite populated I reset that obviously looks horrendous I think that your skin looks a bit too green yeah as I say so skin tends to live in the mid-tones let's click and drag this and see what it does so you can see you can affect all of the colors in that given area and you can push or pull them away from different colors and go into other color spaces so if I thought you were a bit too green which is down here yeah I probably want to push it away opposite yeah so push it up there a bit I mean when you start going too far as it looks incorrect if I started pushing the image up a bit that way you really don't need much on these no less is more absolutely less is more it's very subtle and I would keep jumping backwards and force to see like how does it look I might give you I might give the whole image a little bit more a little bit more exposure I think we've kind of got a good basis I think our image is color mash it doesn't when you play it through it doesn't look particularly jarring or weird no it looks like it's one part it's part the same clip we show what you want obviously absolutely but I think we've gone well we've got a nice sequence here where we've color matched yes now it's time to do color grading now color grading you tend to use a lot the same tools that we just looked at you can use the color wheels you can push color in it into the shadows or you can kind of like change the saturation you can also use color curves which we'll have a look at in a second okay that allows you to kind of do things like give it that like give the shadows more of like a vintage style roll-off where you have like these lifted shadows and stuff there seems to be very popular at the moment we can look at those and then finally we'll add will add some creative loves as well because that's really where the fun begins yeah so let's go back to our adjustment layer and I'm going to use a I think I'm going to use this as like my hero shot somewhere around here because it's got skin tones in it skin tones I think are the most important thing to get perhaps because it's something that well everyone knows what people look like yeah if you get it wrong it's very obvious you've got it wrong where is it an inanimate objects it could be any color it could be anything a person looks like we know if that looks weird if you've got bright pink skins clearly correct yeah this already to be fair I think is looking like a really nice image but let's just see what we can do if I go back to my stack of effects you can see now we've got our nuts which was our Technicolor then we've made some adjustments on the color wheels you can toggle the whole world adjustment layer on and off by pressing V so you can see how far you've come so far and much like all the audio effects and other effects within Final Cut Pro the order of them cascades down so top to bottom so you tend to want to have your technical luck first any other little tweaks you need a creative luck maybe you want your creative locks straight away then do your little tweaks and then any kind of additional sharpening or vignetting that normally happens right here okay okay so we're going to add another lot so I'm going to go back to the effects there I'm gonna go for em LA and I'm gonna drag it on to my adjustment layer and now if we show this this is where we can go to say hello to customer and if we start browsing Lots that we purchased or you can download for free so does the EM lot package come with some nuts with it or do you have to download it separately it does come with some I believe yeah there's free which I think is what it comes with and you can just click on them and start having a look like that's made you very orange that's made you very t ly and orange so I'm going to go into M that I'm going to click on M lot presets now these are currently being loaded in a hundred percent strength which may be a bit strong a lot of the lot of people that sell lots they kind of recommend that you dial it in around fifty to sixty percent and you can come a tweak it to whatever you think looks best that works with your footage so we're browsing these at the moment out one hundred percent of these might look a bit weird to begin with but I'm going to have a look at some that's by Daniel shiver and and I like his thrift shop block so we'll we can have a look at that now that looks pretty yeah it's a lot different already that's quite punchy and ok the great thing I like about em lots is you can just really effortlessly kind of click around and get an idea of what it is that your project would look like I mean that looks pretty good too chopper looks alright I think I think we'll go with thrift shop ok ok so we've added a look and now that we've added the luck we get a bit more control so like I say we can dial in the intensity of the lot we can take all that back to zero which is how it was out the box now that would look like a really good image of iñigo now I think again it looks a little bit plain yeah I think that luck was definitely doing something but you might not want it a hundred percent you might want it about yeah fifty to sixty percent let's go for sixty-five percent okay okay so that worked that shot let's have a look across that some of the other shots because now what we thought was good in terms of exposure previously it might be looking a bit off now potentially I think that's that's adding something like yeah I'm pretty good it's it's a subtle improvement you could always go back a step to the kind of correction absolutely you could change the technical you might get to the creative like oh yeah that's good but then you can go and change the technical like right the beginning and it may add something Holly it's experimentation at this stage if you don't know what really tire you what you're doing experiment experiment experiment but my advice would be to not overdo it so I'm clicking through and I'm looking at these I think that looks like a good shot that looks nice let's just get this other way a little bit so as a get-go I think that it's pretty smart yeah yeah maybe we might want to add a little bit more raised shadows to it just for the sake of this just give it that real vintage vibe so we can do that by introducing the color curves yes so if I click on here and I say I want to add some color curves that's now going to stack another effect at the very end of us so after its processed all the previous ones it will add a new one so you have color curves and this is a representation of dark to light so dark on the very left like though right this luma one affects the whole image and then much like the RGB parade on the left here you can affect just a red Channel just the green Channel just a blue Channel if you have for example like your hair is quite blue glad you said hello you could you can do stuff with this blue channel to affect the color of like you can make it a horrendous which is like that looks a bit like our yeah but if we reset that let's start by adding some points so this is going all the way up the kind of exposure bodies down here like I say this is your this is your lower this is your shadows okay so if I start adding some points and this chart the more points you have the more granular you can be so we've added our points and now you can start to see how this curve will affect the image so if I were to start to drag this up and say so this is darkest this is the darkest of the dark blacks right okay and you can say I want to limit it so that that color what is it's like a threshold bassy for that color so whatever lives that this value actually raised the luminosity of it so what you're doing here is if there was a color this is just before you hit in black here yeah you're actually saying make that darker like it seems really crunching it or make it a lot lighter you can really push up so that look how light I can make all the bits that were really quite dark so that obviously look surrenders but what you can do is you can start to give it a little bit of a fade so just a little bit you can see yeah and that is quite a creative look and some people also seem to like to just that the highlights rolled off a little bit as well like don't let them hit pure white kind of flatten the curve out a little bit it's quite a vintage sort of style you can go quite aggressive with it if you really wanted to I don't particularly like it I think it looks a bit mmm but if we gave it a little bit litters a little bit let's let's kind of fight let's reset the whole lot that's not a couple more points and maybe we'll just lift it a tiny bit just a bit I know you said this a few times but it really is a case of less is more with all of this because when you start piling on your cutter Corrections you learnt and then your curves little changes make such a big difference and there's no right or wrong answer there is no right or wrong answer it's a very creative process and it identifies you as a videographer that becomes your style you also find as well as touch as time goes on your tastes and your styles change yeah it's all about earlier videos that starred a lot all different to how our comments are so whilst we said there's no right or wrong answers there are a couple of other little things you can do with along with the Scopes to help you work out have you got your color gray correct or not now one of the things that I like to do is to include a draw mask with my just malaya so if I come back over to the effects I'm gonna search for draw mask and I'm just going to drag the draw mask on to the adjustment layer and I want that to be my last effect so it was just collapse all of these here's my draw mask and I'm gonna just draw on Neil's head there we go now that I'm on my draw mask I've isolated a patch of skin you can see over here on the vector scopes it's just zoom in a little okay you can see where that this is called the the skin line or the flesh line of Erlich or whether they flash no matter your ethnicity your race or your hue or whether you're black or white or whatever your skin should reside on this line here okay ideally I mean there's going to be times when it doesn't if you're deliberately shooting someone in a very cold environment or it won't always work but in general we should be roughly there if he smiles in the other direction you've got Harvey wrong but but here you can see Neal skin and if anything it's a little bit too red yeah this is this is open to creative interpretation I could maybe change the sample to be down here that's a lot closer to where it where it needs to be this is still saying perhaps it's a little too red so what you could do is you could add a let's add another color wheels right so that's this one here and I'm gonna move it to be the thing that happens just before the draw mask so let's just turn the draw mask off so that's our image this is our color wheels made it bad if we go and edit this color wheels information if I less then I draw a mask back on I'm gonna reset our color wheels so this is saying if anything we want to be a little bit more kind of towards the yellow so what we could do is we could use temperature so as I drag this around you can see your skin changing color wildly under there but as if I drag this all the way to the left it's very purple you can see it's Mars off of your gender line there so ideally I mean if you were going for it you'd be dragging it to like there that's perfectly on the skin line apparently but that looks a bit too warm to me let's have a look it's not too bad yeah how do you think I mean that's pretty yeah sure it's warm that up earlier has here because that you don't have to stick to anything religiously it's up to you I personally think that's a little too warm so I'm gonna just tweak it a little I'm gonna bring it down I'd do it by eye because it was a cold day I'm gonna be about there but I'm happy with that so now you can actually final bits and bobs and listen technically color grading but this is just kind of finishing just like your sharpening yeah so yes maybe we'll add a tiny bit of sharpening and then maybe a vignette just to just to finish things off because I think uh vignette always looks pretty nice right yeah not that much though let's turn that down a bit on a very subtle vignette very subtle just in so I think that we're done let's have a look at the before one of them turns just manera okay very flat yeah very lucky as you'd expect now let's have a look at the after oh yeah you really see a difference so there we have it guys that's how we do our color grading in Final Cut Pro hopefully that was helpful and I think very much a less is more approach deficit in either way Ford is very obvious when somebody's kind of starting out and they're really cranking everything I for putting crazy Lutz on things and they think I'll it's amazing but not to my own earlier videos tiny guilty of it everybody goes through it but this is your chart this is your chance to kind of put your creativity this is your this is how your videos become your style but yes your Glade so everything we said here is just kind of a hint to how you can achieve what it is that you want to go away and achieve with your footage and so yeah I hope you found it helpful and if you did please remember to Like comment 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Channel: Totally Exposed

Views: 12,106

Keywords: final cut pro, final cut pro x, colour grading, color grading, color grading final cut, colour grading final cut pro, cinematic footage final cut pro, colouring final cut pro, convert log footage, convert log clip, working with log final cut pro

Id: pNGp7MOyZRA

Length: 32min 26sec (1946 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020